THE ISRAEL LOBBY: THE OTHER ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

We speak of religious influences over politics with much justifiable hesitation. We want a separation of church and state. We have nightmarish memories of the Holocaust, of pogroms, of the inquisition, and of religious intolerance. Our Constitution states: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic President, pledged to American Baptists and to all Americans that in the case of a conflict between the Catholic Church and the United States, that he would support the interests of the United States.

We voters must now face the fact that there are an astounding number of powerful Zionists who hold high positions in the Executive Branch of our government, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, and in the federal courts below the level of the USSC.

Zionists are those who support a homeland for Jewish people in the Biblical land of Israel. There are 40 million Christian Zionists in the U.S., so Zionists are both Christian and Jew. The boundaries of the Biblical land of Israel extended from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. Zionists in Israel and in the U.S. are now right wing, aggressive hawks, neocons, racist, and oppressive toward the poor in every country. Zionists conceal and sometimes deny even to themselves the fact of Israel’s unilateral capture and 40 year military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the expropriation of farms and villages there and their ongoing expansion of settlements for Jews in the West Bank. Zionists are very aggressive about occupying all of the land of Biblical Israel, with neither concern nor responsibility for the Muslims who have lived there for centuries. Zionism coincides perfectly with the dynamics of unregulated capitalism, and with the ideological objectives of neocons.
Jewish Zionists are political allies of the right wing in the U.S., and of the millions of U.S. citizens who are right wing Christians and Christian Zionists . Zionists are represented in the U.S. by the Israel Lobby of which AIPAC plays a very powerful part.
Israeli Zionists reluctantly participate in “peace processes” when forced by the U.S., but seek to delay even modest proposals while they escalate the expansion of settlements in Muslim territory to continue to “establish facts on the ground.”
Most U.S. Jews are not right wing neocons and yet they uncritically support the Israel Lobby, and maintain a powerfully shaming attitude of “Jewish correctness” that it is “anti-Semitic” to criticize Israel or AIPAC, or to express concern for the plight of Palestinians. Thus American Jews and American Christian Zionists must be considered responsible for all that Israel does to its neighbors.

An initial point of order and clarification: It is NOT anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist, or to be against the current hawkish government and positions of Israel. Similarly, it is not anti-Semitic for one to take the position as I do, that Israel has a right only to the territory within its 1967 borders, and that its capture and military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is wrongful, illegal, in violation of International Law and of the UN Charter. It is not anti-Semitic vigorously to oppose political positions taken Christian Zionists and by American Jews. These distinctions must be widely discussed and debated. We must be prepared for and endure the inevitable deluge of false ad hominem attacks that we are “anti-Semitic.”

Hillary Clinton is not a Jew, but she is a Zionist. So are Senators Charles Schumer, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Joseph Lieberman. So are Congresspersons Rahm Emmanuel, Gabriel Giffords, Tom Lantos, Steny Hoyer, and Henry Waxman. These are only some of the Democrats. All Republicans steadfastly support Zionism in Israel as well. The Zionists influencing the Executive Branch are very prominent: Norman Podhoretz, William Safire, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Martin Peretz, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, Leon Wieseltier, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Leo Strauss, Henry Kissinger, Elliot Abrams, Philip D. Zelikow, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeffrey Bergner, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Peter Rodman, William Schneider, Jr., and Robert B. Zoelick, Douglas Feith, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, James Woolsey, and Richard Armitage. Some have dual citizenship with the US and Israel. They admit to an “unbreakable bond with Israel.” These Zionists ardently supported the Iraq War. Israel and its Israel Lobby, uncritically supported by Christian Zionists and most American Jews, are also lobbying hard for a military attack on Iran.



Zionists no matter where they are placed in the government must be confronted and asked to pledge their first loyalty to the United States and not to Israel.

I believe that an attack on Iran by Israel and/or the United States would be disastrous for the thirty thousand Jews who live comfortably in Iran, disastrous for Israel, disastrous for Jews everywhere, and disastrous for the United States. We who oppose these foreign invasions must now recognize that our former political allies in liberal politics and the civil rights movement, American Jews, are now our political enemies. Elected Zionist representatives claim that the vital wishes of Israel and of the United States are identical, thereby avoiding the issue. So, I must disagree with, publicly expose, and vote against Zionist elected representatives whether they are Jewish or not, who automatically give Israel what it asks for. American Jews, formerly for peace and civil rights, have now chosen to join with the neocons in Israel and in the United States, and with the Christian Right. American Jews have changed from being defenders of truth and justice to supporters of preventive war, torture, and oppression.

The critical political point of all of this is that Christian Zionists have a very large influence on the Republican Party and Jewish Zionists have an overwhelming dominant influence and control of the Democratic Party. Jewish Zionists are the principal reason the Democrats cannot be aggressive about ending the Iraq War or preventing a War with Iran.

I am deeply indebted to Christopher Bollyn for his rigorous intellectual honesty and courage for investigating and writing about the evidence showing Zionist involvement in 9/11. The information that follows was first unearthed and publicized by Bollyn. He and his family have paid a heavy personal price. For all of the facts that follow please see and support his web site at http://www.bollyn.com/index. I have met Bollyn personally and I am convinced that he shares my values. He is not anti-Semitic. He is anti-Zionist, as I am.


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Once this unpleasant subject is opened, it leads to some very surprising other issues. For example, what really happened on 9/11 and what were the causes? Bush and the Zionists in his administration have classified as top secret all of the evidence of what happened on 9/11. Democratic Zionists show no interest in investigating 9/11. There is no apparent reason for this. The wrong doers know what they did. Why should what they did be hidden from the American voters? Bush did his political best to prevent any investigation at all, and then limited the scope of the investigation to what should be done in the future, carefully avoiding the causes and what went wrong. Bush’s additional control of the Official Investigation was his placement of Philip D. Zelikow , a Zionist as the chief of staff who controlled the scope of the inquiry, the input of evidence and the content of the final report which most critics have labeled a complete whitewash. All of the private lawsuits by victims involving 9/11 where the evidence of wrongdoers could be produced had been assigned to Zionist judges Michael B. Mukasey and Alvin K Hellerstein until Mukasey. After Mukasey’s retirement, Hellerstein was assigned control all of the private lawsuits by victims against 9/11 wrongdoers. He actively prevents any of them from going to trial where the hidden facts of 9/11 might be opened to the public. Bush has nominated Mukasey to be the new Attorney General, who from his beliefs and background can be depended upon not to use his position as America’s top lawyer to investigate 9/11 and indict those responsible. When Mukasey was presiding over one of the 9/11 hearings, the lawyers for Arab defendants challenged Mulcasy to recuse himself because he was a Zionist. Mukasey denied the request and stated that the fact of his Zionism “was utterly irrelevant.” A Zionist, Michael Cherthoff is head of Homeland Security and thus the boss of the FBI. All of these Zionists are helping to keep the lid on 9/11 and to prevent any challenge to the official story.

Why are Zionists so interested in suppressing facts about 9/11? 9/11 was a massive crime involving 3000 murders. Obstruction of Justice is a serious federal crime in itself. Why would Zionist Judge Hellerstein not want the truth about the wrongdoers revealed in a trial on the merits? Why would he make the strange order that the damages of the victims be heard in a first separate trial, and that liability issues would be heard in a later trial? Why is he putting immense pressure on the victims to accept money and forget attempting to produce evidence showing who was responsible?

Why would AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, be concerned that physics professor Steven Jones of BYU, carefully following the scientific method, tested some WTC steel residue and found that it contained thermite? This evidence, and the fact that steel stayed molten in the basement of WTC for weeks after 9/11, forces the conclusion that thermite explosives were used to bring down WTC 1, 2 & 7 in controlled demolitions. AIPAC was concerned and successfully pressured BYU to suspend Jones from teaching at BYU. Why would AIPAC be so concerned?

AIPAC’s and the Zionists’ concern may be based on the following facts that tend to show that Israel had a substantial part in causing or allowing 9/11 to happen.

The Forward, New York City’s leading Jewish newspaper reported that the 5 Israelis who had been arrested on 9/11 standing on top of a moving van near the WTC taking pictures of the tragedy and making gestures of celebration, were Mossad agents. (Mossad is Israel’s CIA). The paper further reported that the van was owned by Urban Moving Company which was a Mossad front. The 5 Mossad agents were Oded Ellner, Omer Gauriel Marman, Yaron Shmuel, Paul Kurzberg, and Sivan Kurzberg. After their deportation to Israel on November 20, 2002, 3 of them appeared on Israeli television and stated that they were “documenting the event.” They obviously knew ahead of time when and where the disaster would occur so that they could be there to document it.

Further evidence of the zealous Zionist effort to suppress facts of 9/11 is revealed in the following. Would you not like to know the identity of the “prominent New York congressmen”?

“Late October 2001: Intense Political Pressure to Release Suspected Israeli Spies Arrested on 9/11

Around this time intense political pressure is put on US officials holding five Israeli men arrested for suspicious behavior at the time of the 9/11 attacks (see 3:56 p.m. September 11, 2001). According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified “prominent New York congressmen” lobby heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News, well-known criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also becomes involved as a negotiator to help get the men released. (Dershowitz will later refuse to comment on the matter.) [CounterPunch, 2/7/2007] ABC News will later report that was “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials” over the five men, resulting in a settlement. [ABC News, 6/21/2002] Apparently the political pressure will succeed because the men will be released a few weeks later (see November 20, 2001]).”
The above information is part of Paul Thompson’s time line of all publicly available information about 9/11 set forth in his time line at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project
(Readers will find it profitable to read all of the entries in the time line under the heading “Israel.”)


Approximately two hours before the attack (in other words about 6:45 am on 9/11) two employees of Odigo Inc, an Israeli owned instant messaging company located two blocks from WTC, received text messages warning of the attack. Washington Post 9-28-01.

There is much much more that I will put in a future article. Guess what company controlled security at Logan Airport in Boston on 9/11? Guess who owned the 99 year leases on WTC buildings, prudently insured them in January, 2001 and then recovered nearly $5 billion in insurance on an investment of $100 million?

This cover-up, this obstruction of justice, cannot be maintained forever. When the whole truth emerges, this involvement of Israel could produce a firestorm of anti-Semitism and hatred of the United States that could sweep the planet for decades. We all should take note and do our best to indict the 9/11 wrongdoers, hold them accountable as criminals, and then do all we can to maintain temperate civilized life for all, be they Christian, Jew or Muslim.

October 27, 2007

Douglas R. Page, Tucson, AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net


END NOTES
Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists have different reasons for their close tactical alliance. Christian Zionists believe that the expansion of Israel is a part of the coming War of Armageddon when Jesus will appear on earth and convert the Jews to Christianity. If the Jews refuse to convert, Jesus will send them to Hell. Jewish Zionists welcome the help of these Christian Zionists and believe that the second coming of Jesus is highly improbable, a “risk worth taking,” as Rabbi Lerner puts it in his article critical of the Israel Lobby in the September issue of Tikkun.

2 Wikipedia lists some further fascinating information about Zelikow. He is a very bright, holds both a PhD. and a law degree, and has been a professor at major universities. His field of academic specialty and expertise is the creation and maintenance of, in his words, “public myths” or “public presumptions,” which he defines as “beliefs” (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common with the relevant political community.” Was this why he was chosen to write the obviously phony official report of 9/11?
Another fascinating tid bit: Zelikow has also written about terrorism and national security, including a set of Harvard case studies on "Policing Northern Ireland." In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article entitled "Catastrophic Terrorism," in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently."
What a strange coincidence that 9/11 happened at the World Trade Center and caused exactly the response that Zelikow predicted.

UNCONTROLLABLE CAPITALISM

The Elephant in the Living Room that will kill us all unless we give it Our Full Attention

We sometimes label those topics that we are too inhibited to talk about as an “elephant in the living room.” In our nation, nobody talks about the social adequacy of Capitalism. Capitalism is such an elephant in the living room. Almost no one is aware of the fact that capitalism is uncontrollable by voters because of its dynamics.

THE UNCONTROLLABLE AXIOMATIC DYNAMICS OF CAPITALISM

1. The very core of capitalism is hiring. Forget the “good” employers that you know. They are an atypical tiny minority. The actual pervasive dynamic is this: A man with money hires a man with no money to work for the employer at the lowest possible wage so as to earn as much profit for the employer as possible.

2. This dynamic, repeated thousands of times over many decades, produces a group of human employers and those who invest with them, with immense money and power. Capitalism thus creates a group of humans with the power and the incentive to thwart the majority will and voting power of democratic voters.

3. This group uses its power and its money to:

• Own or control the media, advertising and PR sectors. It uses the manipulative PR “arts” surrounding patriotism, jingoism, militarism, nationalism, and racism to augment its control. This group thus controls even what we think about.

• Thwart majority democratic rule of voters by bribery of elected officials, euphemistically called “campaign contributions.” Capitalism thus becomes uncontrollable by the ballot box political process of voters.

• Control the government, regulatory agencies, foreign policy, the military, and the intelligence agencies.

• Outsource anywhere on the planet to obtain the cheapest possible labor, with no responsibility whatever to their existing employees, their home communities, or even the national security manufacturing interests of the nation.

• Defy all regulation, warm the globe, and pollute the air, the oceans, and the upper atmosphere. Capitalists use forests, the fishes of the sea, tillable soil, and potable water simply as a “factor of production” to make as much profit as possible, and with no responsibility to the community or humanity. Capitalism, with its awesome uncontrollable power is thus the very antithesis of socially responsible sustainability.

4. Capitalists and their employees are the source of funding for academics, “liberal” magazines, and NGO’s like Common Cause, the Sierra Club, and other “cause” organizations, and their employees.

Al Gore and the Nobel Committee are prime examples of our failure to give attention to “the elephant in the living room.” Al Gore has received the Nobel Prize for his work publicizing Global Warming, although he completely ignores the greedy economic engine that causes Global Warming.

http://www.counterpunch.org/frank10152007.html

We can never achieve a sustainable civilized life on this planet unless we understand the dynamics of capitalism. Voting for Hillary, or voting for anybody who accepts campaign money bribes, will do absolutely no good. With an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, we can, acting together, exercise control:

• We can stop working, stop buying, and stop listening to capitalist media and PR.
• We can become aware of the lack of legitimacy of the capitalist status quo, of its crippling affect on our democratic voting power, and of its destruction of the planet. Capitalism is the deadly enemy of sustainability.
• We can prohibit private hiring for profit altogether or,
• We can require employers to get annual permits to hire humans, conditioned upon decent wages and working conditions, and limitations on the profits of an employer and investors.
• We can insist on a steeply progressive tax on wealth and income to diminish the power of this class of capitalists.

As we create this sustainable civilized life, we must maintain a consciousness of the awesome anti-social dynamics of capitalism so that we never again let capitalism get out of control.

Please meditate on the following social phenomena and the possible contribution of uncontrollable capitalism to each:

• The increasing number of people who are being treated for personal depression.

• The high levels of personal debt in American households

• The compounding obesity of the US population in the last ten years.

• The instability and fragility of the US economy and the constant risk we endure.

• The fact that this richest nation on earth cannot provide adequate health coverage for its residents, or even its children.

• The fact that the income of dentists has escalated far more than the cost of living, while 40% of US children have untreated cavities.

• The incessant PR message that all government and all taxes for community purposes are evil.

• The immense disparity between of wealth between the top 1% in the U.S. who get 21% if the income and the 12% earned by the bottom 50%, and the social consequences of that disparity.

• The ongoing chatter about further tax cuts for the rich.

• The fact that the typical college graduate leaves college with a debt of $50 to $150 thousand dollars that will consume 1/3 or his post graduate income for ten years.

• The fact that our dams, free ways, levees, and our entire public infrastructure are in very bad repair.

• The fact that we as a people and as a nation are unable to enact laws and policies that would insure a sustainable civilized survival for our off spring.

• The fact that our manufacturing industries and jobs have been outsourced to other countries, so that no longer needed employees can only get low paying jobs in fast food franchises.

• The fact that we get into one war after another against “communists” and “terrorists,” spending a huge portion of our national treasure.

• The fact that we as a people are immobilized, passive, and submissive to these drastic changes that have occurred in the last 20 years, particularly in the last 10. Our capacity for outrage, rebellion, and protest has been extinguished.

• The fact that neither Republicans nor Democrats offer any real solutions to the foregoing.

October 18, 2007

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net